Science Fiction Studies

#61 = Volume 20, Part 3 = November 1993

Eric White

The Erotics of Becoming: XENOGENESIS
and The Thing

Evolutionary theory has often figured in science fiction as a
powerfully resonant topic, a privileged point of departure for the staging of a
variety of highly charged concerns and conflicts. In some narratives, the
positing of a shared kinship between humans and other animals provokes revulsion
at the implied refusal of any claim to human preeminence in the greater scheme
of things. But the erosion of "Man" as a putatively ontological
category and the prospect, moreover, of reality as a Joycean "chaosmos"
of perpetual change or metamorphosis can also be depicted affirmatively. The
theoretical elaboration of an evolutionary universe need not exclusively elicit
horror and anguish. It may also prompt the speculative imagination to
extrapolate a future for what might be dubbed "the post-human body
becoming." In this essay I’m going to examine a number of exemplary
responses in science fiction to the advent of modern evolutionary thought.
Discussion will focus in particular on John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The
Thing and Octavia Butler’s more recent XENOGENESIS
trilogy as evolutionist narratives offering respectively traumatized and
affirmative perspectives on a world in which, as Heraclitus long ago put it,
"everything flows and nothing abides, everything gives way and nothing
stays fixed."

1.

"You made us in the House of Pain.
You made us—things! Not man, not beast, part man, part beast—things!"
(The Sayer of the Law to Dr Moreau, in The Island of Lost Souls)

I’ll begin with a brief look at H.G. Wells’ 1896 Island
of Dr. Moreau, a tale in which the blurring of the boundary between Culture
and Nature occasions anxiety about the validity of other hierarchically paired
terms including the "mind"/"body" and
"male"/"female" binarisms. In the chapter entitled "The
Thing in the Forest," Wells’ narrator Prendick turns to Nature for
consolation when he can no longer bear listening to the cries that emanate from
the House of Pain where the mad scientist Dr. Moreau engages in vivisectionist
experiments to find out "the extreme limit of plasticity in a living
shape" (§14:75). As he wanders through the jungle surrounding Moreau’s
laboratory, Prendick comes upon a streamlet running through a narrow valley
surrounded by luxuriant vegetation and tropical flowers, an Edenic setting that
signals its friendly welcome by means of the frolicsome presence of a playful
rabbit scampering through the underbrush. Predictably, given the pastoral topos
Wells is amplifying in this passage, Prendick finds it "too hot to think
elaborately" and falls "into a tranquil state midway between dozing
and waking" (§9:37). In the bower of a beneficent, nurturing Nature, the
stage is set for a restorative encounter between human Mind and the natural
world’s correspondent breeze.

But Prendick’s happy musings are abruptly terminated when a
"rustling amidst the greenery on the other side of the stream"
presages the shocking apparition of a man "going on all-fours like a
beast!" (§9:38). Instead of the reassuring revelation of a higher destiny
for humanity, Prendick confronts a "half-bestial creature"
disturbingly bereft of innate human dignity. His drowsy tranquillity now wholly
dispelled, he pushes on through the jungle only to be made anxious yet again
when, in what at first seems a totally gratuitous narrative detail, he observes
"a great patch of vivid scarlet on the ground" that turns out "to
be a peculiar fungus branched and corrugated like a foliaceous lichen, but
deliquescing into slime at the touch" (§9:39). On the one hand, this
sudden transformation of highly articulated structure into undifferentiated
formlessness suggests an evolutionary universe in which entropy ultimately
rules. But the assimilation here of "order" to "chaos" can
also be read as ambiguating the distinction between "male" and
"female." Such an interpretation depends on seeing in the image of
scarlet fungus deliquescing into slime an allusion to menstrual blood, a claim
that is not really exorbitant given the traditional association of the
"female" with the "natural" explicitly invoked elsewhere in
the story. For instance, when Moreau’s creations begin to revert to their
former bestial ways (and thence devolve into a "generalised animalism"
in which heterogeneous species traits commingle in disgustingly hybrid
confusion), the first ones among them to "disregard the injunction of
decency—deliberately for the most part" are precisely the females
(§21:128). 1

Prendick’s subsequent discovery of the dead body of the
rabbit with its head torn off—an unwelcome reminder of the ubiquity of
predation in Nature throws him into an explicitly paranoiac state: "The
thicket about me became altered to my imagination. Every shadow became something
more than a shadow, became an ambush, every rustle a threat. Invisible things
seemed watching me." Overcome by panic, Prendick thrusts himself
"violently—possibly even frantically—through the bushes, anxious [to
find] some clear space" and so free himself from the embrace of a natural
setting that had proven inhospitable not merely as a physical threat but as a
challenge to his very self-definition and essence (§9:39). When he arrives at
what seems a clear space, however, Prendick is confronted by yet another
ambiguation of the boundary separating Culture from Nature. As he watches in
horrified fascination, three "grotesque human figures" sitting in the
middle of the clearing begin first to "gibber in unison," and then,
"rising to their feet [and] spreading their hands," sway "their
bodies in rhythm with their chant." Soon, their "ugly faces...brighten
with an expression of strange pleasure" and they drool "from their
lipless mouths." Struck with the realization that each of these creatures
"had woven into it, into its movements, into the expression of its
countenance, into its whole presence, some now irresistable suggestion of a hog,
a swinish taint, the unmistakable mark of the beast," Prendick is forced to
recognize the origin of Culture (and specifically religious ritual) in the
repulsively ludicrous spectacle of dancing pigs chanting what sounds like "‘Aloola
or ‘Baloola"’ (§9:40).

Not surprisingly, upon his return to London at the end of the
story, Prendick can no longer affirm his former belief that his fellow citizens
are "perfectly reasonable creatures...emancipated from instinct." As
he gazes upon his fellows, he feels "as though the animal was surging up
through them" (§20:136). He therefore withdraws from society and seeks
consolation in astronomical research, discovering "a sense of infinite
peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven." The immutable
coherence and order of strictly physical reality (understood according to a
Newtonian model that was already anachronistic by the end of the 19th century)
will henceforth provide "solace" for "whatever is more than
animal within us." Placing his trust in the "vast and eternal
laws" of inorganic, non-living matter as the last best hope for a realm of
pure spirit invulnerable to evolutionary process, Prendick in effect embraces
death (§20:138).

Moreau is no less traumatized by the biological chaos of
evolution as aimless transformation—"a blind fate, a vast pitiless
mechanism" (§16:98)— and the psychic chaos of a voraciously appetitive
desiring body for which the rational self is a mere appendage or instrument.
Notwithstanding his pretensions to scientific detachment and disinterested
curiosity, Moreau’s dream of becoming an evolutionary agent as
"remorseless as Nature" issues from a stereotypical sadistic fantasy
of affectless mastery and transcendence. The "strange colorless
delight" of what he claims are purely "intellectual desires" is
merely a disguise for unacknowledged fear and rage. In his attempts to
extinguish pain and pleasure in his experimental subjects, Moreau seeks
desperately to eradicate every reminder of the fact of his own animal
embodiment. Pain and pleasure, he says, "are for us, only so long as we
wriggle in the dust" (§14:75). 2

2.

[Moreau:] "After I had made a number
of human creatures I made a thing—— ... It wasn’t finished. It was
purely an experiment. It was a limbless thing with a horrible face that
writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion." (§14:77-78)

[Prendick:] "The thing is an
abomination." (§14:75)

In order to enlarge this account of the fear of becoming so
extravagantly enacted in The Island of Dr. Moreau I want to turn now to
the characterization of "abjection" developed by Julia Kristeva in her
Powers of Horror. Kristeva employs this term as a name for certain
intense feelings of revulsion, disgust, fear, and contempt provoked in the
subject when it encounters phenomena that disturb "identity, system,
order.... [that do] not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the
ambiguous, the composite" (Kristeva 4). "Abjection" designates an
unnameable "other" that abolishes clarity and distinction, order and
degree, an unnameable nemesis, in fact, that threatens the subject with a return
to primordial chaos. In Kristeva’s psychoanalytic rendition of the genesis of
the self, the subject who confronts the abject experiences a recurrence of the
moment of crisis when the infant first separates itself from its original
environment in order to begin the difficult task of constructing its own
distinct identity. "Abjection" thus pertains to the inaugural act of
what will eventually become an "I," the first fragile and precarious
emergence of order out of chaos, structure out of indifferentiation, permanence
out of turbulent fluidity.

On the one hand, what is "abjected" by the infant as
a horror too terrifying to face is the hitherto blissful union with the maternal
body that the infant now perceives as equally a condition of dependency and
helplessness. On the other, this "violent, clumsy breaking away" from
the potentially "stifling" embrace of the mother entails as well an
alienation from the infant’s own body, to the extent it experiences its body
as a disruptive tumult of unruly instinctual energy (13). In the beginning, as
it were, there is only the endlessly metamorphic flux of the drives, a condition
of pure becoming inimical to settled identity, to self-possession and
reality-mastery. At the moment of crisis, the turbulent forces of the id
provoke, in horrified response, an attempt to expel these energies in order to
achieve a condition of imperturbability no longer vulnerable to disruptive
intrusions from without. The abjecting of both the mother’s and its own body
clears a space within which the infant begins to elaborate a narcissistic
fantasy of totality that will form the basis for a rigidly fixed adult ego that
finds its characteristic social corollary in pyramidal structures of
hierarchical subordination. Such a dogmatically inflexible form of selfhood,
which seeks to check the disquieting spontaneity of the body by channeling its
desires along reassuringly routine itineraries, can only consent to its animal
embodiment on the certain promise that it must, one day, ascend to a spiritual
plane of everlasting perfection.

Beyond its specifically psychoanalytic provenance, Kristeva’s
discussion of abjection is indebted to Mary Douglas’s anthropological
speculations in Purity and Danger concerning the Biblical notion of
"abomination." The term refers to phenomena regarded as unholy or
"polluted" for either of two reasons. "Abominations," first
of all, constitute a disquieting reminder that humanity is mired in a material
world from which death can never be banished. Under the rubric of the
abominable, "Man" repudiates what the fact of his animal embodiment
inescapably entails. Bodily wastes and secretions (such as menstrual blood) are
defiling, that is, precisely because they reveal the body to be an organic
process like any other and hence fated to pass away. In addition to thus
underscoring the body’s mortal destiny, abominations also trouble the desire
for a knowable and by implication masterable universe by serving notice that
reality is incomprehensibly "chaotic" to the extent that anomalies and
paradoxes thwart every attempt to subdue phenomena to a logical scheme.
"Holiness," which depends upon "correct definition,
discrimination and order," requires both "that individuals shall
conform to the class to which they belong....[and] that different classes of
things shall not be confused" (Douglas 53). At issue here is the dream of
residing within the precincts of the sacred, secure in the knowledge that a
place has providentially been provided for everything and everything is
eternally in its proper place. But such an "inside" is inevitably
constituted in relation to a hostile "outside" that comprises a
permanent threat. The center finds itself persecuted by "hybrids" and
"confusions," by "monsters" that "confound the general
scheme of the world" (55) or reveal every representation of reality to be a
historically contingent interpretation rather than an immutable truth.

As an example of such a confusion or transgression of
customary categories, consider Moreau’s "limbless thing with a horrible
face that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion" (§14:78).
According to Douglas, animals that creep, crawl or swarm are regarded in the
Book of Leviticus as especially abominable. "Swarming," it turns out,
is "explicitly contrary to holiness" because it is an
"indeterminate form of movement" proper neither to "fish, flesh
nor fowl." Worms—which are associated with "death and chaos"
not only because of the way they move but because, all the more repulsively,
they feast upon the bodies of the dead (Douglas 56)— and wormlike creatures in
general thus participate in unholiness. Moreau’s monstrous serpent is
loathsome in just this sense. Its abominably fluid writhing might even be said
to provide an apt emblem for the incessant flux of an evolutionary universe in
which nothing is sacred. In this connection, the pertinence of the related
topics of "abjection" and "abomination" in assessing the
cultural reception of evolutionary theory can be said to reside in the fact that
the eternally shapeshifting natural world is precisely abject and abominable in
its unpredictable, uncontrollable, and ultimately fatal spontaneity. Prendick
and Moreau experience a crisis of abjection when they discover that evolutionary
theory threatens their personal investments in autonomy and self-possession. In
positing the relatedness of all living creatures and the impermanence of every
natural kind, the theory of evolution profanes the sacred by rendering
contingent or culturally constructed the putatively ontological distinctions
between "Man" and "animal," "Culture" and
"Nature," "mind" and "body," "male" and
"female." The prospect of evolution as limitless becoming revives
archaic fears that Western civilization since its inception has sought to banish
through the elaboration of symbolic codes meant to assure the self that
invulnerability to change is an achievable goal if not yet an accomplished fact.

This age-old dream of abolishing mutability and mortality
ensues, of course, merely in a constriction of the possibilities of everyday
life. If the abject represents chaos, the dissolution of structure and form, it
stands as well for the the vitality and libidinal intensity of unrestrained
drive energy understood according to the Blakean formula that "Energy is
the only life, and is from the body; and Reason is the bound or outward
circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight" (Blake 182). The
chaotic fecundity that Kristeva calls the "semiotic chora," which
might be thought of as the "good" abjection, propels every genuinely
inventive cultural practice. All artistic activity, she says, transpires
"on the fragile border...where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not
exist or only barely so" (Kristeva 207). She thus looks forward to a
reconciliation with the abject reminiscent of what Gertrude Stein had in mind
when she announced her desire to "act so that there is no use in a
center" (Stein 498). Contemporary literature—by which Kristeva means a
tradition including such writers as Dostoyevsky, Lautréamont, Proust, Kafka,
Joyce, Artaud, and Borges—"propounds...a sublimation of abjection" (Kristeva
26). In a Nietzschean inflection of the Aristotelian principle of catharsis, she
describes this sublimation of abjection as one in which "rhythm and
song...arouse the impure, the other of mind, the
passionate-corporeal-sexual-virile, but they harmonize it.... They thus soothe
frenzied outbursts...by contributing an external rule, a poetic one,
which fills the gap, inherited from Plato between body and soul" (28). In
other words, the literature that says yes to abjection—recapitulating
Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy as a dynamic of the Apollonian with the
Dionysian would alleviate the alienation of "spirit" from
"matter" by founding aesthetic invention precisely on the flux of
becoming.

3.

"The abject confronts us...with those
fragile states where man strays on the territories of the animal." (Kristeva
12)

Like Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau, John Carpenter’s
1982 film version of The Thing and Octavia Butler’s XENOGENESIS novels (1987-89) seek to dramatize the import of evolutionary theory.
Both of these narratives interpret biological evolution as a process of
limitless becoming or metamorphosis that deprives every putative finality of
ontological warrant. "Humanity" is a historically contingent,
transitional phenomenon rather than the apex of biological possibility. But the
responses to this scenario in X ENOGENESIS and The Thing are antithetical. Where The Thing powerfully
registers the anguish and horror occasioned by the recognition of human
subjection to evolutionary process, in X ENOGENESIS Butler attempts to work through this trauma in order to affirm becoming.

Carpenter’s The Thing shares The Island of Dr
Moreau’s dread at the prospect of losing definition and essence. In this
film, "humanity" is represented by a community of male researchers at
a facility in the Antarctic (allegorically, civilization in the context of a
literally cold, indifferent universe) in whom autotelic affective or passional
experience is subordinated to the instrumental technoscientific mastery of
nature. Thus committed to maintaining mind in a relationship of preeminence with
respect to the body, and "Man" in a relationship of preeminence with
respect to the natural world, the inhabitants of the research station are
confronted by what they perceive to be a plague or contagion—the life force
itself—that infects them with the potential of becoming other.

The polymorphic Thing, capable of absorbing the human as but
one among other morphological possibilities in its seemingly infinite
repertoire, can be understood, that is, as the embodiment of evolution.
Hideously metamorphic, compounded of tentacles, insect and crustacean-like
appendages, dismembered mammalian and especially human bodies, and covered in
slime, this unclassifiable presence transgresses every attempt to impose a
rational structure upon experience.3 The diverse organisms engulfed
by its jellylike protoplasm are disassembled and recycled as so much raw
material for a swirling chaos of partial forms and heterogeneous anatomical
parts that challenges the very notion of bodily integrity and coherence. A
visually disgusting pastiche of biological possibilities, the Thing in fact
amounts to a rendering simultaneous of the entire history of evolutionary
process, a spectacle of ceaseless change so horrifying, finally, that by the end
of the film the inhabitants of the research station are prepared to destroy
their station and themselves—in other words, destroy civilization—rather
than consent to a universe in flux.

As the story unfolds, an increasingly paranoiac atmosphere
pervades the research station. Once they realize that their nemesis is a
shapeshifter capable, when it chooses, of dissembling itself as any of the
life-forms it has assimilated, the men at the station become suspicious of one
another. In what quickly becomes a refrain running through the film, one
character confesses, "I don’t know who to trust anymore." No one can
be certain of the "humanity" of his companions. Nor can anyone remain
confident of his own "human nature." The Thing renders ambiguous, that
is, the distinction between mind and body. The fear now is that the rational
self-possessed ego cannot legitimately claim to be, in Freud’s phrase, the
master in its own house because it moves at the promptings of unaccountable
urges and impulses.

The social intelligibility and male privilege secured by the
hierarchical subordination of female to male is no less imperiled by the Thing’s
metamorphic energy. The Thing is already understood as a threat to a
specifically male subject-position in "Who Goes There?," the 1938
short story by John W. Campbell upon which Carpenter’s film is based. Campbell
introduces his hero McReady as a "man of bronze" from "some
forgotten myth, a looming bronze statue that held life, and walked....
Age-resisting endurance of the metal spoke in the cragged heavy outlines of his
face" (247). The apparent imperviousness to time of cold hard metal is thus
fetishized as Campbell endows McReady with an aura of phallic omnipotence
the better to dispel concern about the precariousness of "Man’s"
dominion over Nature. In the Carpenter film, an explicitly female antagonist
confronts McReady at the very beginning of the story in a scene in which
Carpenter subtly critiques the phallicized hero’s inability to tolerate the
slightest challenge to his self-image as master of every situation. McReady here
petulantly disables a computer that speaks with a female voice by pouring his
drink into its circuitry after it outwits him in a chess match.4 The
Thing is similarly coded as female later in the film when it bites off the arms
of one man, phantasmatically castrating him with what looks like the proverbial vagina
dentata. The Thing is not simply, however, the projection of male paranoia
regarding a potential female reversal of male dominance. In its culminating
manifestation, McReady witnesses a grotesque profusion of vaginal and phallic
forms that renders the Thing indeterminately male and female. The monstrous
shapeshifter thus undoes the intelligibility of gender itself by literally
embodying the male and female anatomical parts upon which the cultural
construction of gender is founded.

Carpenter’s The Thing is remarkable for its
powerfully intense evocation (thanks to the astonishing special effects) of the
multifarious horrors attending an evolutionary worldview. Neither the Howard
Hawks’ 1951 Thing from Another World nor the John Campbell short story
that inspired both films are so candid. While the Carpenter film presents a
horrified engagement with the realization that no species can exempt itself from
the reality of ceaseless flux, the two other narratives in effect avert their
gaze from this unwelcome scenario. In Hawks’ version of The Thing, for
instance, the extraterrestrial threat to human specificity is a humanoid
vegetable—"An intellectual carrot, the mind boggles!"—that
reverses the customary predatory relationship between plants and animals by
vampirically drinking the blood of the dogs and humans it preys upon at the
research station. Evolution is understood here according to such catchphrases as
"survival of the fittest" and "nature red in tooth and
claw," a view whose threatening implications can be neutralized relatively
easily by positing a qualitative distinction between culture, where distinctly
human values prevail, and nature, realm of brute instinct. The Hawks film thus
screens or displaces attention from the more frightening prospect of limitless
becoming and directionless change. By demonizing an ultimately masterable nature—and
the "insanely ...chuckling" shapeshifter of Campbell’s tale is
certainly demonic (Campbell 263)—The Thing from Another World
forestalls the emergence of other threats. Despite the presence of a
stereotypical mad scientist who naively assumes that any technologically
"advanced" life form must somehow have transcended its instinctual
nature, confidence in the ontological primacy of the rational self remains firm.
Moreover, the film does not betray any anxiety about the implications of
evolutionary theory for traditional conceptions of gender. Notwithstanding the
characteristic Hawksian repartée between the male and female leads, the film
complacently presupposes that if women are to be admitted to the public sphere
of scientific research they will there occupy only subordinate positions.

In "Who Goes There?," and in Alan Dean Foster’s
novelization of Carpenter’s film, the Thing is assumed to return, in moments
of crisis, to an authentic, original form. Far from just any and every
thing, it has a specific nature and might therefore be defined scientifically or
assigned a niche in a comprehensive taxonomy of life-forms that would facilitate
its ultimate subjugation. The Carpenter film, on the other hand, is closer to a
more intriguing possibility left largely implicit in Campbell’s story, namely,
that the Thing is a figure for pure becoming, without an essence that would in
any way define its "unkillable vitality" or provide a telos
orienting its mutations toward some predetermined end. A veritable
Deleuzo-guattarian schizo-nomad that "can imitate anything—that is,
become anything," the Thing is so decentered it is not even a unified
entity: "every part is a whole. Every piece is self-sufficient, an
animal in itself" (Campbell 266, 290). Carpenter’s film plays as well
with the further possibility that the spreading contagion of "thingness"
is not merely terrifying and repulsive. Along with all the dread and horror, the
Thing undeniably evokes fascination, the fascination of a forbidden object of
desire. Kristeva remarks at one point that "the abject is edged with the
sublime" (11). I want to suggest that the very intensity of the
pleasure-pain of horror and fright may propel the viewers of this film beyond
themselves, enabling them to experience, if only for a moment, the genuinely
sublime prospect of no longer residing securely in their customary identities.
To the extent they identify with the Thing, they would thus themselves
become unclassifiable and unnameable shapeshifters. Such is the possibility that
Octavia Butler entertains in X ENOGENESIS ,
a term that might be rendered, precisely, as "becoming other."

4.

[Blair, the biologist:] "[the Thing]
is just as much a legitimate child of Nature as you are. You are displaying
that childish human weakness of hating the different.... Just because its
nature is different, you haven’t any right to say it’s necessarily
evil." (259)

[Norris, the physicist:] "Child of
Nature, eh? Well, it was a hell of an evil Nature." (259)

[McReady, addressing the Thing:] "We
have what you, your otherworld race, evidently doesn’t. Not an imitated, but
a bred-in-the-bone instinct, a driving, unquenchable fire that’s genuine. We’ll
fight, fight with a ferocity you may attempt to imitate, but you’ll never
equal. We’re human." (91) —"Who
Goes There?"

Octavia Butler’s X ENOGENESIS novels offer an alternative response to the prospect of the human body as
a contingent possibility within the metamorphic body of evolutionary Nature. The
trilogy can in fact be said to intervene in and reverse a tradition of paranoiac
responses to evolution in which Nature in effect persecutes Culture. Although
the extraterrestrials who plan to mate or "trade genes" with humanity
are initially regarded as frighteningly repulsive, inducing "panic"
and "xenophobia" among the few human survivors of nuclear apocalypse (Dawn
§1.3:22), the loss of human specificity entailed in hybridization with the
irreducibly other is, in the last analysis, depicted affirmatively. And this is
so much so that, in X ENOGENESIS ,
the Thing has become the hero of the tale.

Correspondences between Butler’s narrative and the various
retellings of The Thing are striking. In Campell’s "Who Goes
There?" the face of the alien shapeshifter is described as "ringed
with a writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue mobile worms that crawled where
hair should grow" (255-56). Similarly, on first encountering the alien
Oankali, Butler’s protagonist Lilith is reminded of snakes, worms and sea
slugs grown large and humanoid in appearance: "Some of the ‘hair’
writhed independently, a nest of snakes.... The tentacles were elastic.... She
imagined big, slowly writhing, dying night crawlers stretched along the sidewalk
after a rain. She imagined small, tentacled sea slugs—nudibranchs—grown
impossibly to human size and shape, and, obscenely, sounding more like a human
being than some humans" (Dawn §1.2:11-12). And she pronounces the
name "Medusa," a mythological monster that can be interpreted in the
present context as a figure for everything abject and abominable. Again, in the
Campbell story the alien "is a member of a supremely intelligent race, a
race that has learned the deepest secrets of biology and turned them to its
use" (Campbell 266).

Butler’s aliens too are masters of genetic engineering, so
masterful they require no technology but are able to manipulate DNA within their
own bodies. Moreover, as the Thing is nearly infinitely divisible, every part of
it another Thing unto itself, so the bodies of the Oankali are not organic
unities but colonies of symbiotically co-habiting cells. Finally, in Carpenter’s
The Thing, the introduction of a single alien cell into an organism will
cause that organism to become itself a shapeshifter. In XENOGENESIS ,
the aliens trace their lineage back to a tiny virus-like "organelle."
They evolved "through the organelle’s invasion, acquisition, duplication,
and symbiosis" with other life forms (Imago §1.4:23). The aliens
are driven by the organelle to evolve, to hybridize with other species and thus
continually to transform themselves and the species with which they interbreed.

The problem for Butler is not the Thing but a flaw in the
human species that is especially marked in human males. As Lilith says:
"Humans fear difference.... [They] persecute their different ones, yet they
need them to give themselves definition and status" (Adulthood Rites
§2.4:80). Human nature entails a dangerous "contradiction" between
two traits: high intelligence and a predisposition to "hierarchy" that
manifests itself in psychological and social structures of domination and
control. In the course of the trilogy, the survivors of nuclear apocalypse amply
manifest a lengthy and all too familiar catalog of human vices—egotism, leader
worship, ideological and religious dogmatism, sexual assault, multifarious forms
of scapegoating (including sexism, racism, and homophobia)—all of which
involve the exclusion and subordination of an "outside" in relation to
a privileged "inside."

When the Oankali propose to mate with them, Lilith—named
after Adam’s legendary first wife who gave birth to monsters after she was
banished from Paradise for refusing to accept Adam’s primacy—and her fellow
survivors must come to terms with the prospect of becoming radically other from
what humanity has always been. The Oankali would decenter human experience,
transforming hierarchical power structures and binary oppositions into a play of
differences along a number of axes. First of all, Oankali evolutionary history
proceeds without any premeditated goal or recoverable origin serving as a point
of orientation. As these nomads wander the galaxy, "the one direction that’s
closed" to them is the one that would lead them back to their "homeworld"
(Dawn §1.5:34). One might say the reason why they can’t return to the
place of their origin is because they have none. Gene trading for the Oankali is
a biologically rooted compulsion that traces to the organelle they carry in
every cell of their bodies. To the extent the Oankali have a specific nature
distinguishing them from other life-forms, this "origin" founding
their identity as a distinct group would reside in that "miniscule cell
within a cell," a life-form so rudimentary it amounts to little more than a
genetically-encoded instruction to become other. Further, although the Oankali
do undoubtedly acquire adaptive advantages when they augment their repertoire of
biological forms (they frequently express their desire to avoid
"overspecialization"), gene trading does not primarily serve an
adaptive function. These apostles of becoming are not guided in their matings by
a criterion of adaptive optimization.5 When Lilith asks them if they
intend to improve the human species, the Oankali answer that becoming other will
not make humanity better, "only different" (Dawn §1.5:32). The
Oankali thus become other in order to...become other. They are in fact averse to
any teleological organization of experience. Oankali genetic engineering is
consequently accomplished biologically rather than technologically because the
aliens believe that reliance upon technology (even their spaceships are
organisms) tends to instrumentalize the immanent experience of embodiment,
subordinating the body’s self-delight to an end beyond itself.

Perhaps most unsettling about the Oankali is the fact that
they come in three distinct sexes: male, female, and a third sex neither male
nor female nor the bisexual synthesis of masculine and feminine in a single
being. They thus trouble what is arguably the source of all dualistic thought:
the (apparent) sexual dimorphism that serves as the basis for every hierarchized
binarism. Their third sex—known as the "ooloi"—comes equipped with
two elephant trunk-like "sensory arms" with which it manipulates DNA
and thereby guides the course of Oankali evolution. It also employs these
sensory arms to gratify its sexual partners by tapping directly into the
pleasure centers of the brain. Such pleasure is not localized in a particular
bodily region. Undoing the privileging of genital over other erogenous zones,
alien sex is polymorphously perverse. Erotic intensity is evenly dispersed
across the surface of the body. Oankali sensory experience in general is
acentric in just this way. The aliens neither privilege the faculty of sight
over the other senses nor concentrate perception and sensation in discrete
sensory organs, relying instead on the multifarious tentacles that cover them
everywhere. Finally, in alien sex, the nervous systems of all the partners are
connected, so that each experiences not only its own but the other’s pleasure
as well. In this manner, the aliens can abolish the dualism of self and other.
The species as a whole, in fact, periodically links up to form a single nervous
system in order to deliberate on matters of general concern.

The arrival of these nomadic, shapeshifting, triply-sexed,
polymorphously perverse, pleasure-seeking, medusoid, extraterrestrial genetic
engineers would thus seem to herald for humanity an ideally
"post-human" future of unlimited possibility. But XENOGENESIS
does not, finally, elaborate so utopian a vision, choosing instead to remain
speculative and critical about the prospects for an affirmative orientation
toward evolutionary process. Attention is frequently drawn, first of all, to the
fact that the humans have little say in the matter of the "gene
trade." Lilith, for instance, who was doubly marginalized as an African
American in US society by race and by gender, is acutely discerning not merely
of hierarchy more or less openly avowed but of the ruses by means of which power
can dissemble itself as benevolence. Even as she advises her hybrid son when he
feels a conflict between his Oankali and human sides to "try to go the
Oankali way" and "embrace difference" (Adulthood Rites
§2.4:80), she reminds the Oankali throughout the trilogy of the coercive, in
fact, compulsory character of their "invitation" to acculturate to the
Oankali way of life. In other words, the survivors of nuclear apocalypse,
regardless of their own wishes, will be assimilated by the Oankali with the
consequence that humanity as a distinct species will come to an end. If the
behavior depicted here is typical of Oankali trade practices, then the aliens
are merely imperialistic or piratical adventurers who roam the galaxy preying
upon and ultimately abolishing the difference they crave in its specificity. The
protagonist of the second volume, a hybrid who speaks for the humans even as he
identifies with the Oankali, makes this point: the humans "will only be
something we consumed" as the Oankali pursue a death-driven desire to
totalize within themselves the sum biotic potential of the universe (Adulthood
Rites §3.4:199).

When the Oankali are made to realize that they have indeed
been treating the humans who oppose the gene trade "with cruelty and
condescension," they do allow a group of dissident humans to found a colony
on Mars (Adulthood Rites §2.19:159). Such a new beginning for humanity
does not appear particularly hopeful, however, in the light of Butler’s fairly
unrelenting portrayal of human depravity. Lilith’s son rather unpersuasively
proposes that chance or random mutation may ensue in an evolutionary leap beyond
humanity’s present capacity for self-destruction. In the interim, aggressive
energies will be directed against the harsh Martian environment in what amounts
to a war against Nature (§4.5:261). But it is worth noting, given Butler’s
critique of the Oankali as predatory upon biological and cultural difference,
that one of the second volume’s principal characters is a former stage actor,
or someone accustomed in his daily activity to becoming at least temporarily
someone else. The popular success of such figures in the arts and in diverse
cultural realms, to the extent it’s more than a matter of personal charisma,
can be said to depend precisely on their ability to other themselves. Human
agonism in its ludic forms might thus be interpreted to provide a powerful
mechanism for producing rather than simply consuming difference. Indeed,
the Oankali, whose propensity for consensus has resulted in a rather
claustrophobic social uniformity, are attracted to the humans precisely by what
they term "human diversity," or the "fascinating and
seductive" capacity for inventing a seemingly limitless array of cultural
structures and practices (§1.5:30).

Butler introduces a further qualification in the last volume
of XENOGENESIS , this time involving
her earlier apparent valorization of limitless becoming. Until they encounter
the human species, the aliens’ largely decentered and multiplicitous existence
has been constrained in but one respect. Although they are driven to become
other, they can only do so from one generation to the next. None of them, prior
to their contact with the humans, are literally protean. But from human cancer
cells they acquire the ability to reprogram their DNA at will and thus reinvent
themselves as true shapeshifters. Such creatures appear in the concluding volume
where they enter the story in the form of that third sex charged with driving
alien evolution. It turns out, however, that pure potentiality, the ability to
become anything at all, amounts to an impasse. When one of the first generation
of shapeshifters wanders off and loses contact with its fellows, it begins to
devolve. Drifting toward ever more simple forms, by the time it is rescued it
has become "a kind of near mollusc, something that had no bones left. Its
sensory tentacles were intact, but it no longer had eyes or other Human sensory
organs. Its skin, very smooth, was protected by a coating of slime.... It was a
. . . a great slug" (Imago §3.2:150-51). As the giant slug’s
still anatomically complex sibling puts it, these protean organisms find it
easier "to do as water does: allow [themselves] to be contained, and take
on the shape of [their] containers," than preserve a shape of their own
(§1.4:89). Structural complexity, and the consequent possibility of further
differentiation and metamorphosis, depends on their being situated in a social
matrix less chaotically mutable than themselves.

Butler thus imagines a revised economy of repetition and
difference in which difference is neither persecuted as a threat to identity nor
interpreted as subordinate in an attempt to justify a desire for primacy but in
which repetition also finds a new legitimation. The advent of shapeshifters able
to transform themselves at will enables maximally flexible and innovative
responsiveness to heterogeneous situations. In order to avoid dissolution,
however, these shapeshifters, principal agents in the process of "xenogenesis"
or becoming other, require a community—the embodied memory of past biological
and cultural becomings—to serve as a point of orientation or recurrence in the
midst of limitless variability. The community’s self-similarity rescues the
shapeshifter from randomized becomings and devolution into chaos. Meanwhile, the
shapeshifter’s providentially destabilizing improvisationality in turn saves
its community from investing in some putatively essential identity or definition
of itself. In other words, the community can never claim to be present to itself
as the resolved unity of its previous interactions with otherness. At any given
moment, its identity has been contrived as a historically situated response to a
particular set of circumstances. From out of a vast archive of possibilities
accumulated during eons of wanderings, a specific solution has been fashioned to
the problem at hand. Identity is forged in an encounter between the present
opportunity and some likely portion of the already existing biological and
cultural repertoire.

I’m going to close now by observing that the revised economy
of repetition and difference figured in the last volume of XENOGENESIS
as a specifically social dynamic has a psychological corollary. Consider once
more the fundamental opposition between the respective standpoints of
"Humanity" and the "Oankali" established at the beginning of
the trilogy that Butler resolves, initially at least, in favor of the
extraterrestrials’ dream of shapeshifting. Interpreted as an allegory about
the vicissitudes of desire, Butler can here be said to reverse the customary
subordination of body to mind by envisioning an ideal condition in which the
flux of the material world provokes a limitless series of heterogeneous states
of desiring intensity. This paradisal prospect depends upon exorcising the
spectre of "human nature" understood as a restrictive economy that
confines libidinal energy within a narrow range of arbitrarily privileged
satisfactions. Her subsequent reiteration of the structural opposition between
"Oankali" and "human" in the relationship that obtains in
the new species between the shapeshifter and its partners, however, moves to
avert the threat of a disabling condition of complete psychic disorganization by
reaffirming the position formerly occupied by the "human." But instead
of a fixity that remains identical with itself no matter the circumstances,
psychological structure is presented as provisional and revisable, rhyming
with itself from one occasion to the next yet never recurring in precisely the
same manner. Butler’s effort to work through the crisis of abjection
occasioned by the advent of modern evolutionary thought thus enacts the
following passage. From an "erotics of being" transpiring under the
rubric of the "human" that abominates the body and materiality in
general, XENOGENESIS arrives at an
"erotics of becoming" that does not simply dismiss identity in favor
of desiring metamorphosis but, instead, proposes the self-similar mutations of a
subject-in-process as a way to reconcile the need for psychological structure
with the possibility of embracing the flux of matter in motion.

NOTES

1. In a draft version of Moreau,
Prendick speaks of a "peculiar orange-coloured fungus"
(emphasis added). Fortunately for the present interpretation, Wells subsequently
changed the fungus’ colour. Thanks to Robert Philmus for bringing this to my
attention: see his variorum critical edition of Moreau (University of Georgia
Press, 1993). Thanks also to Kelly Hurley, whose expertise in the field of Slime
Studies has been invaluable throughout.

2. Philmus makes this point: Prendick and
Moreau "agree that pain is the link between man and beast. But Moreau goes
on to stress the need for man to sever that connection, to overcome his
susceptibility to pain and thereby transcend his animal nature"; see his Into
the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H.G. Wells
(9).

3. Consider in this connection Stephen
Prince’s discussion of The Thing: "As a horribly anomalous animal,
the thing represents a form of cosmic pollution, an entity existing outside the
accepted categories that give shape to human life and knowledge. Its very
existence challenges the ontology separating human from non-human, solid from
liquid, inedible from enedible. It threatens to erase the distinctions and, in
doing so, to erase the bounded human world" (26).

4 Misogynist overtones are more marked in
Bill Lancaster’s screenplay for The Thing, where the only female is a
blow-up sex doll.

5. In an interview, Butler comments on the
tendency in some evolutionist thought to attribute an adaptive benefit to every
species trait: "I kept reading things like, ‘The purpose of such-and-such
behavior is so-and-so’—in other words, the assumption that every behavior
has a purpose important to survival. Let’s face it, some behaviors don’t; if
they’re genetic at all, they only have to stay out of the way of survival to
continue. Then...I read one of Stephen Jay Gould’s books in which he says much
the same things. I was relieved to see a biologist write that some things—physical
characteristics or behaviors—don’t kill you or save you; they may be riding
along with some important genetic characteristic, though they don’t have to
be" (McCaffery 62). For more on Gould’s critique of what he calls the
"adaptationist paradigm," see my essay: "The End of
Metanarratives in Evolutionary Biology" in Modern Language Quarterly
51:63-81, March 1990.

Abstract. - Evolutionary
theory has often figured in science fiction as a powerfully resonant topic, a
privileged point of departure for the staging of a variety of highly charged
concerns and conflicts. In some narratives, the positing of a shared kinship
between humans and other animals provokes revulsion at the implied refusal of
any claim to human preeminence in the greater scheme of things. But the erosion
of "Man" as a putatively ontological category and the prospect,
moreover, of reality as a Joycean "chasosmos" of perpetual change or
metamorphois can also be depicted affirmatively. The theoretical elaboration of
an evolutionary universe need not exclusively elicit horror and anguish. It may
also prompt the speculative imagination to extrapolate a future for what might
be dubbed "the post-human body becoming."

This essay examines a number of exemplary responses in SF to
the advent of modern evolutionary thought. Discussion focuses in particular on
John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing and
Octavia Butler’s more recent XENOGENESIS trilogy as evolutionist
narratives offering respectively traumatized and affirmative perspectives on a
world in which, as Heraclitus long ago put it, "everything flows and
nothing abides, everything gives way and nothing stays fixed." (EW)